The World of Green Gables

Anyone who has ever read the L M Montgomery classic, Anne of Green Gables will have been whisked away to a wild landscape of rolling fields and woodland, fringed with rugged red sandstone cliffs. To be honest, we had never really thought about the novel’s setting until we spent some time in Prince Edward Island in Canada, and, on a whim, decided to visit the Green Gables farm which has been turned nto a museum celebrating the book and its author – and we were so glad we did.

It’s probably Prince Edward Island’s most visited tourist attraction, so it’s a bit of a cheat to call it an undiscovered place. But to be fair, we’d not heard about it until we were actually in Charlottetown, so it was undiscovered by us!

L M Montgomery was by all accounts a remarkable woman. When you first enter the museum, there’s an exhibition about her life, She was one of the first authors to fight aggressively for her rights over her own creations. When her publisher, L.C. Page & Company, kept selling merchandise and film rights to Anne of Green Gables without her consent or fair compensation, she took them to court – and won, after nearly a decade of litigation. This was remarkably rare for any author, let alone a woman, in the early 20th century.

Publicly, Montgomery was cheerful, pious, and devoted – the model minister’s wife (she married Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald in 1911). Privately, her journals (published posthumously) reveal a much darker interior life: chronic depression, a marriage strained by her husband’s own severe mental illness, and deep unhappiness that she hid from the public for decades. Anne became a massive bestseller worldwide, yet Montgomery felt trapped by Anne’s success — she wrote several sequels somewhat reluctantly, wanting to be recognized for other work instead.

The landscape of Anne is essentially a love letter to the village of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, and Montgomery rarely strayed from Maritime settings in her work.

Once you’re through the exhibition, you walk out to the farmhouse itself which, not surprisingly, actually has green gables. The farmhouse actually belonged to Montgomery’s cousins; the house and farm provided much of the inspiration for the book and has been restored to the period of the late 1800s. Montgomery herself never lived there, but visited often and used it as the model for the fictional Green Gables.

The farmhouse layout, farmyard, and surrounding landscape became the literal blueprint for the fictional Cuthbert farm in the novel. Inside, the house has been restored to the way it would have looked at the time.

Also on the site are two of the most iconic literary walks in Canada, the Haunted Wood and Lover’s Lane, both named directly after locations in the book.

During the summer, the centre can get very busy. We visited quite early in the morning, and were able to enjoy the site in relative peace and quiet, but by the time we left, it was getting quite a lot busier.

A separate site about 15 minutes away, at the actual home of Montgomery’s aunt and uncle. This property has been owned by the Campbell family since 1776 and is still operated by descendants of her Aunt Annie and Uncle John Campbell. This one has a much more personal, biographical connection to Montgomery herself — it’s filled with original furnishings and artifacts, including Anne’s Enchanted Bookcase, the author’s hand-sewn Crazy Patchwork Quilt, and her self-developed photographs. Notably, this is the parlour where Montgomery chose to be married on July 5, 1911, and couples still travel here to marry in the same room. The grounds include Anne’s famous “Lake of Shining Waters” and a carriage ride option.

Getting there

Getting to Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish is pretty straightforward — PEI is small, so nothing is too far. It’s about a 30–40 minute drive north from Charlottetown to Cavendish. The site’s address is 8619 Cavendish Rd, Cavendish, PE, and it’s well signposted once you’re in the Cavendish area. There’s a parking area on site.